"What else could I mean?" she asked him huskily.
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, leaning back in his seat again. "Of course. Certainly. I fully understand you," and he closed his eyes as if about to lapse into a refreshing nap.
Mrs. Treharne, distinctly wrought up, grasped one of the lapels of his seal-lined greatcoat and shook him determinedly.
"Be good enough to explain to me, and at once, precisely what you mean," she said rapidly, a growing hoarseness in her tone.
Judd, for his part, promptly relapsed into his chuckling.
"It is nothing, my dear—nothing at all, I assure you," he said, between wheezes. "Only it strikes me as rather diverting that anybody should consider Jesse in the light of a matrimonial eligible. When, by the way, did you gather the idea that Jesse was a marrying man? Since that—er—somewhat widely-exploited little affair of his in the West Indies last year? Or more recently?"
Judd generally won in the little skirmishes they had in the motor car. The fact that he had won again was plainly indicated by the fact that she remained silent for the remainder of the ride.
CHAPTER VI
Louise, still bound by the discipline of school, was not a late sleeper. As early as seven o'clock on the morning following Langdon Jesse's call she was lying awake, striving to dispel, by the process of optimistic reasoning, the sinister nimbus that seemed to be enshrouding her, when the telephone bell in her dressing room began to ring persistently. Louise sprang up to answer the call.